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The Unfinished Dollhouse: A family’s transition with a transgender child

By Nick PatchSpecial to the Star

Sat., Oct. 28, 2017

In October 2012, Michelle Alfano’s 15-year-old first came out to her as transgender. In 2013, as Alfano writes in her new memoir The Unfinished Dollhouse, Alfano herself feels she came out “as a person who feared and misunderstood gender identity and sexual orientation.”

A rather harsh self-criticism? Well, yes, but over the course of Alfano’s heart-wrenching memoir about her only child’s journey to claiming his identity and her own journey toward understanding him, one thing becomes clear: she has no interest in minimizing her mistakes.

“I didn’t understand what was going on,” she recalled recently, chatting in the sunny inner courtyard of University of Toronto’s Knox College. “I was hostile to some of the changes. I didn’t want to go through some of the changes with him. I had an aggressive attitude about it sometimes. We’d fight about pronouns.

“I just think it was an ignorant attitude. I needed to come around, and if I could do it, I think other people can come around too.”

Fortunately, The Unfinished Dollhouse is a testament to how far both have since come.

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Its title comes from one of Alfano’s first memories of Frankie bristling at prescribed gender roles. On Frankie’s fourth birthday, Alfano and her husband Rob bought a kit to build for their child an ornate dollhouse from a tony store on Mount Pleasant, but Frankie showed just as little interest as he had in dolls. By age seven, Frankie began rebelling against the pretty dresses Alfano kept buying, and every wedding or formal event would become the launching point for another argument.

At 13, alarming signs about Frankie’s mental health emerged. He complained of headaches, exhaustion and insomnia, about pain in his stomach, his foot, his head, his chest. He stopped playing hockey, lost interest in guitar and art, and stopped seeing friends. After a while, Frankie was missing up to four days of school per week, with Alfano and her husband perplexed about how to deal with an adolescent too depressed to emerge from bed.

Frankie began seeing a string of specialists, doctors, psychiatrists and counsellors, none of whom offered an answer to his suffering. Eventually, after Alfano and her husband discovered an online relationship Frankie had been secretly carrying on with a girl, Frankie came out to the family as gay. At first, the revelation was a relief that Alfano figured would finally ease Frankie’s burden, but depression continued to consume him.

Finally, they were buckling up in the parking lot of a No Frills one chilly fall night when Frankie announced he had something important to say. By way of introduction, he told his mother he’d been wearing a chest binder to flatten his curves. Surely, Frankie then asked, Alfano knew what he was about to say? She didn’t.

“I have to say, it was quite shocking to me. I had no sense of him being trans,” she recalled. “It felt like a bomb had gone off. And then all this stuff started flooding through me, things that had been building up for years — ‘that’s what that meant’ and ‘that’s what that meant.’ It all kind of made sense.”

Alfano was supportive in the moment, but concedes she struggled with elements of Frankie’s transition. She felt dismayed when Frankie first mentioned changing his name and found it difficult to initially accept referring to him as her son. Other smaller incidents resonated; when Frankie untagged himself in a baby picture Alfano had posted on Facebook, his mother wept.

Frankie’s school, fortunately, was also sympathetic — more so, in fact, than they had been to the mental-health issues that had plagued him (Alfano recalls with anger that, at one point after Frankie finally worked up the courage to go to school during his depression, a teacher sized him up and said: “You don’t look sick.”) Family and friends have mostly been supportive too, and those who haven’t “are not in (their) lives anymore.”

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Those friends and acquaintances do have questions, which Alfano notes can range from innocent to intrusively inappropriate to downright idiotic: What does your family think? Does he have a girlfriend? Does your family accept him? What’s his real name?

“I had a friend who said to me: ‘What’s the hard science behind this? How do you know he’s trans?’” Alfano recalled. “I had a miserable, depressed kid with a dozen ailments who, when he came out, gradually became a happy, well-adjusted, stable kid. That’s my hard science.

“I’m still trying to figure out,” she added, “why people feel they’re entitled to all this information about trans people.”

Ultimately, Alfano tolerates (most of) such curiosity for largely the same reason she wrote the book: she wants people to become more comfortable around transgender people. Understanding Frankie’s journey could help.

Sometimes, Alfano acknowledges that she has “melancholic little episodes” recalling Frankie’s teen years. Fortunately, her son is quick to bring her out of it.

“He just puts his arm around me and says, ‘Mom, but look at me, I’m good. I’m in school, I have a partner, I have a job, the family is accepting. Don’t think about that stuff anymore,’” she said.

“He’s not perfect. He’s just a jerky 21-year-old like everyone else. He’s everything you expect a kid that age to be.”

Next? Alfano would love for Frankie to tell his story himself.

“I wrote this because at 16, when I started, he was not well. He was barely functioning. He was extremely ill. He couldn’t tell his own story,” she said. “But he’s rapidly getting to the point where he can tell his own story and I want him to tell it. People want to hear it from his mouth. They want to hear what it’s like. And I think if you begin to understand what especially a kid has to go through to transition, maybe you won’t be quite as ambivalent or harsh toward people who are trans.”

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